Evolution of UV Vision and Wing Coloration in Heliconius Butterflies and Co-Mimics

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Project Title: Evolution of UV Vision and Wing Coloration in Heliconius Butterflies and Co-mimicsPrincipal Investigator: Briscoe, Adrianna D.Co-Principal Investigator: Reed, Robert D.NSF Project Number: 1025106Mimicry, the phenomenon by which organisms come to resemble distantly related distasteful or poisonous organisms, provides some of the strongest examples of adaptive evolution in the wild. While there is much evidence to suggest that the visual systems and color signals of aquatic animals evolve in tandem, the extent to which such correlated evolution exists in terrestrial animals like mimetic butterflies and their visual predators is largely an open question. This proposal is based on a recent discovery that duplication and positive selection of an ultraviolet-sensitive visual pigment in Heliconius butterflies coincided with the evolution of UV-yellow pigments on their wings which may serve as a signal to both visual predators and/or potential mates. The project seeks to investigate the evolution of wing pigments and visual eye pigments in Heliconius, and a community of cloud forest butterflies that mimic Heliconius using anatomical, molecular, physiological and computational modeling experiments. Together with environmental light measurements, these data will be used to refine computational models of butterfly and avian color vision to further our understanding of the potential benefit to the organisms of evolving new visual photoreceptors and signals in the ultraviolet range. A postdoc, graduate student and several undergraduates including members of underrepresented groups in the sciences will be trained in molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry and spectrometric methods. Genetic data will be deposited in the publically available database GenBank http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/ and wing reflectance spectra will be made available online in journal and lab websites.